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Weak-to-strong generalization is a phenomenon in post-training whereby a strong student model, when finetuned solely with feedback from a weaker teacher, can not only surpass the teacher, but can improve upon its own capabilities. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Scott Geng , Dutch Hansen , Jerry Li

The classic teacher-student model in machine learning posits that a strong teacher supervises a weak student to improve the student's capabilities. We instead consider the inverted situation, where a weak teacher supervises a strong student…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 David X. Wu , Anant Sahai

Weak-to-Strong Generalization (Burns et al., 2024) is the phenomenon whereby a strong student, say GPT-4, learns a task from a weak teacher, say GPT-2, and ends up significantly outperforming the teacher. We show that this phenomenon does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Marko Medvedev , Kaifeng Lyu , Dingli Yu , Sanjeev Arora , Zhiyuan Li , Nathan Srebro

Weak-to-strong generalization, where a student model trained on imperfect labels generated by a weaker teacher nonetheless surpasses that teacher, has been widely observed but the mechanisms that enable it have remained poorly understood.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-27 Behrad Moniri , Hamed Hassani

Weak-to-strong generalization, where weakly supervised strong models outperform their weaker teachers, offers a promising approach to aligning superhuman models with human values. To deepen the understanding of this approach, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Wei Yao , Wenkai Yang , Gengze Xu , Ziqiao Wang , Yankai Lin , Yong Liu

Weak-to-strong generalization refers to the phenomenon where a stronger model trained under supervision from a weaker one can outperform its teacher. While prior studies aim to explain this effect, most theoretical insights are limited to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Junsoo Oh , Jerry Song , Chulhee Yun

Recent advances in large language models have shown capabilities that are extraordinary and near-superhuman. These models operate with such complexity that reliably evaluating and aligning them proves challenging for humans. This leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Moses Charikar , Chirag Pabbaraju , Kirankumar Shiragur

Weak-to-Strong Generalization (W2SG), where a weak model supervises a stronger one, serves as an important analogy for understanding how humans might guide superhuman intelligence in the future. Promising empirical results revealed that a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Yihao Xue , Jiping Li , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Superalignment, where humans act as weak supervisors for superhuman models, has become a crucial problem with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent work has preliminarily studied this problem by using weak models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Wenkai Yang , Shiqi Shen , Guangyao Shen , Wei Yao , Yong Liu , Zhi Gong , Yankai Lin , Ji-Rong Wen

We initiate a unified theoretical and algorithmic study of a key problem in weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization: when fine-tuning a strong pre-trained student with pseudolabels from a weaker teacher on a downstream task with spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Chenruo Liu , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

Weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) refers to the phenomenon where a strong student model, trained on a dataset labeled by a weak teacher, ultimately outperforms the teacher on the target task. Recent studies attribute this performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Gengze Xu , Wei Yao , Ziqiao Wang , Yong Liu

As large language models advance toward superhuman performance, ensuring their alignment with human values and abilities grows increasingly complex. Weak-to-strong generalization offers a promising approach by leveraging predictions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Wei Yao , Wenkai Yang , Ziqiao Wang , Yankai Lin , Yong Liu

Steering the behavior of a strong model pre-trained on internet-scale data can be difficult due to the scarcity of competent supervisors. Recent studies reveal that, despite supervisory noises, a strong student model may surpass its weak…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Yuejiang Liu , Alexandre Alahi

Advances in large language models raise the question of how alignment techniques will adapt as models become increasingly complex and humans will only be able to supervise them weakly. Weak-to-Strong mimics such a scenario where weak model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Ziyun Cui , Ziyang Zhang , Guangzhi Sun , Wen Wu , Chao Zhang

We study generalization properties of weakly supervised learning. That is, learning where only a few "strong" labels (the actual target of our prediction) are present but many more "weak" labels are available. In particular, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Joshua Robinson , Stefanie Jegelka , Suvrit Sra

Weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization is a type of finetuning (FT) where a strong (large) student model is trained on pseudo-labels generated by a weak teacher. Surprisingly, W2S FT often outperforms the weak teacher. We seek to understand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yijun Dong , Yicheng Li , Yunai Li , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei

Recent advancements in large language models have sparked interest in their extraordinary and near-superhuman capabilities, leading researchers to explore methods for evaluating and optimizing these abilities, which is called…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Jianyuan Guo , Hanting Chen , Chengcheng Wang , Kai Han , Chang Xu , Yunhe Wang

It is increasingly common in machine learning to use learned models to label data and then employ such data to train more capable models. The phenomenon of weak-to-strong generalization exemplifies the advantage of this two-stage procedure:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Diyuan Wu , Lehan Chen , Theodor Misiakiewicz , Marco Mondelli

The weak-to-strong generalization phenomenon is the driver for important machine learning applications including highly data-efficient learning and, most recently, performing superalignment. While decades of research have resulted in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Changho Shin , John Cooper , Frederic Sala

Aligning powerful AI models on tasks that surpass human evaluation capabilities is the central problem of \textbf{superalignment}. To address this problem, weak-to-strong generalization aims to elicit the capabilities of strong models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Junhao Shi , Qinyuan Cheng , Zhaoye Fei , Yining Zheng , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu
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